UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
MPs shoot themselves in foot over expenses
The online release of MPs’ expense claims has only served to further dent their already battered reputation.
Forty-two days after the Daily Telegraph began to investigate MPs’ expenses the Houses of Parliament finally got round to publishing official details of them. Or rather it didn’t, as lots of key information was blacked out.
Britain’s newspapers spelt out their condemnation – in black and white – of this supposed exercise in freedom of information.
The Sun labelled MPs “Blankers”, the Daily Mirror led with the headline: “Blackwash”, while the Daily Mail posed the question: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”
Commons officials insisted that the information that had been blacked out was done to protect MPs’ security, but the consensus of Britain’s media was that the political classes had shot themselves in the foot.
“Yesterday’s exercise in obfuscation suggested the House of Commons has learnt nothing,” opined the Daily Telegraph’s editorial, with the paper promising to publish an uncensored version of every MP’s expense claim on Saturday.
“The Portcullis House edition of the dossier does not so much slam the door behind a bolted stallion as painstakingly construct a new stable in order to house a dead nag,” wrote the Guardian.
Has “Auntie” got it right?
After a week of media frenzy, the BBC hopes it has taken action to end the crisis caused by the crude prank call made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on the latter’s Radio 2 show.
Brand has quit and Jonathan Ross has been suspended after the presenters left lewd comments on the answerphone of 78-year-old “Fawlty Towers” actor Andrew Sachs. The head of Radio 2 Lesley Douglas has also resigned.
The outcome it would appear has left no one happy. Most commentators feel the BBC took far too long to act on an issue that had clearly angered the public with more than 30,000 people making a complaint.
Many newspapers feel Douglas was unjustly sacrificed, taking the rap for mistakes made by production staff she had little or nothing to do with. The Daily Mirror said she was a “big loss to weak BBC”.
What it means for the BBC is unclear. Its governing body, the BBC Trust, says lessons must be learned and editorial guidelines tightened without jeopardising creativity and “edgy” programmes.
Those like the Daily Mail, a regular critic of the broadcaster, want the corporation to go further, citing other “highly offensive” jokes, including one about the Queen, that have appeared on the BBC since the row erupted.
Others worry that fear of causing offence will make the BBC safe and irrelevant.
“who will watch him now” asked Offended of Tunbridge Wells.
Well I will, for one. And so will the millions of people who used to enjoy watching him before the mindless hordes of vacuous Daily Mail readers got onto their blue-rinse bandwagon. Those professionally-offended minority will not dictate to the quiet and sensible majority what we watch or listen to.
Hard as it may be for them to believe, but they speak for nobody but themselves, and I find their presumption that they in some way speak for the country simultaneously insulting and worrying.
Thatcher’s dead, get over it. (You mean she’s not? Ah well, another week or so…)
Thursday’s front pages
THE GUARDIAN: Recession alert as Brown fights back
Gordon Brown’s drive to recapture the political agenda with a programme of new laws to create “an opportunity-rich Britain” was badly shaken yesterday by King’s warning.
“The nice decade is behind us,” Mervyn King declared in funereal tones, warning that the economy was “travelling along a bumpy road” as he predicted rising prices would put a squeeze on take-home pay for millions of workers.
Full story here
FINANCIAL TIMES: No rate cuts before 2010
Britons should not expect another cut in interest rates for at least two years, the Bank of England indicated yesterday as it warned that inflation would rise far above its previous forecasts and persist at levels well above the government’s target until early 2010.
Wednesday’s front pages
The papers are nearly all agreed that Chancellor Alistair Darling’s 2.7 billion pound fix for the 10p tax row is the day’s main story.
“Darling seeks end to 10p tax backlash” reports the Financial Times, noting that the move will still leave 1.1 million poorer households worse off following the abolition of the lowest tax band in last year’s budget.
For the Daily Mail the tax giveaway is a “2.7 billion pound gamble” to appease fury on the Labour backbenches over the scrapping of the 10p starting rate.
But the papers also find room for other stories: Drivers face a 185 pound tax to park at work, says the Daily Telegraph of a government push to cut traffic congestion. The paper reports that Nottingham city council will be the first to introduce the “workplace parking levy as an alternative to road pricing.
The Sun reports that Yorkshire ripper Peter Sutcliffe is making a legal bid for freedom from the secure Broadmoor hospital, claiming his human rights have been breached. It says Sutcliffe, jailed in 1981 for killing 13 women, wants to be declared sane and given a release date.
The Independent opts for an analytic lead, suggesting that “Britain could once again be haunted by the spectre of stagflation“. It says a combination of stagnant output and high inflation not seen for decades will dog policymakers for months if not years to come.
By contrast the Daily Express says there is “Now a race to cut prices“, reporting that supermarkets Asda and Tesco and mortgage lender Nationwide have all unveiled plans for a host of cost-cutting deals to help “Britain’s hard-pressed families.”
Tuesday’s front pages
The cost of living and falling house prices, school tests, knife crime and pictures from the Chinese earthquake feature in Tuesday’s headlines.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Abolish Tests for Pupils at 11 and 14, Urge MPs
MPs who say pupils are being drilled to pass exams to inflate schools’ positions in league tables rather than being encouraged to learn, are calling for some tests to be scrapped, the paper says. Story here
DAILY EXPRESS: 415 pounds Jump in Energy Bills
The paper continues to say the cost of living is on the rise, this time pointing out that families face an increase in energy bills of 46 percent. Story here
DAILY MIRROR: Saint Jimmy
The paper quotes the mother of Jimmy Mizen, killed in an unprovoked attack in a London bakers, about how she believes her son will go to heaven. Story here
Monday’s front pages
There were further potentially damaging revelations about Gordon Brown from within the Labour Party, claims about the rising cost of living, as well as coverage of Manchester United’s Premier League title win on Monday’s front pages.
DAILY EXPRESS: Family Tax Up 51 Percent
The tax burden has risen by 51 percent under Labour and the average family now pays a crippling 20,700 pounds a year, the paper says. Story here
FINANCIAL TIMES: Banks’ Losses to Hit Public Finances
Losses suffered by the country’s largest banks as a result of the global credit turmoil will add further pressure on the public finances by cutting the amount of corporation tax paid by the financial services industry, the paper says. Story here
THE INDEPENDENT: Strawberry Fields Forsaken
Millions of pounds worth of soft fruit and vegetables are likely to be left to rot in fields this summer because of a shortage of foreign pickers caused by the falling value of the pound and new restrictions on the number of seasonal labourers allowed to enter Britain, farmers’ leaders warned the paper. Story here
Friday’s front pages
Abortion, Ant and Dec’s award – that wasn’t, and the confessions of the Austrian cellar man dominate the front pages of Friday’s papers.
THE INDEPENDENT: Abortion; the Battle Lines Are Drawn
The paper uses just three lines of text and three pictures for its main story about survival rates of premature babies and its significance in the abortion debate. Story here
THE TIMES: Drivers in Worse Jam as Traffic Plan Fails
The paper says motorists are wasting more time sitting in queues on motorways and A-roads because the government has failed to meet its key three-year target for reducing congestion. Story here
THE SUN: Hitler Made Me Do It
The man at the centre of the Austrian cell scandal has blamed his tyrannical rapist behaviour on his growing up under Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, the paper says – using a photo of Fritzl interposed on an image of Hitler. Story here
Thursday’s front pages: anti-social behaviour
The latest initiative to tackle anti-social behaviour and an apparent loophole in airport security feature prominently on Thursday’s front pages, along with the Chelsea gun siege and the Austrian house of horrors.
The Guardian says Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wants police to harass anti-social youths and make life as unpleasant for them as they do for their victims. Young thugs should be hounded and filmed. Story here
The Daily Telegraph is among several newspapers to pick up a BBC 2 “Newsnight” expose that foreign employees working in sensitive airport locations are not having their criminal records checked because of the time and effort that would involve. Story here
The Daily Mail features a picture of the wife of the Chelsea siege gunman looking on in horror during the standoff and runs the story under the headline: “I Love My Wife Dearly” — the message the paper says he threw out of a window before his death. Story here
A report that suggests Britain wastes around 10 billion pounds worth of food a year is the subject of The Independent front page. The paper says most of the waste is made up of entirely untouched food products. Story here
The Sun splashes what it says is the last picture of Elisabeth Fritzl before she was imprisoned for 24 years in a cellar by her father. Story here, while the Daily Mirror leads on the father’s insistence that he is not a monster because at least he did not kill his daughter and the children he fathered with her. Story here
The Times carries allegations from an Iraqi cleaner and two cooks that a culture of sexual harassment, abuse and bullying exists at the British embassy in Baghdad. Story here
Tuesday’s front pages
The destruction and loss of life caused by the cyclone in Burma features on many of the broadsheet front pages, while Chelsea’s win, which keeps the title race going until the final day of the football season, is promoted in all the papers.
DAILY MAIL: Abortion: Fight to Save 2,500 Babies Every Year
MPs will begin a fight to cut the number of abortions by limiting a woman’s right to have a termination for social reasons, from the current 24 weeks to 20, the paper says. Story here
DAILY MIRROR: Boy from the Cellar
The paper features a picture of one of the children born in the cellar in Austria where his mother was kept captive for 24 years. Alex was one of three who was brought up in the family home upstairs. Story here
DAILY EXPRESS: Secret 25 percent Pay Rise for MPs
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The Wall
Anybody who has ever worked for a boss or colleague with a limitless sense of entitlement will recognise the behaviour pattern. Don’t wait for them to learn or adapt – they never will. Their perspective is to vaguely observe that things have unaccountably (but temporarily) gone wrong with the universe’s processes for adapting to them.
The term ‘Narcissitic Personality Disorder’ fits perfectly.
To use an aussie expression ‘trust them as far as you can spit a fridge’